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So for those of you that have not been following too closely, I recently left my day job to focus full-time on an entrepreneurial venture. And it isn’t Cogmap! (more on that in a forthcoming post.)

Anyway, during the last 5+ years I have spent working for the man, I have built a nice little LinkedIn network and my policy was straightforward:

This is my non-promiscuous network. Every person that I am connected to, I am connected to so closely that if they know someone that you want to meet, I can get you that meeting. Being in the inner circle is valuable because 3rd degree connections work really well via me.

Now I find myself in new, uncharted territory. There are people on LinkedIn that I know, but not well enough to be able to make the same commitment that I have made previously. However, now that I am doing my own thing, it might be nice for me to be able to take advantage of these relatively weak connections to exploit my own 2nd degree relationships.

One of the things I don’t like about LinkedIn is that, ideally, I would like a way to be able to mark “BFFs” or something, so I can know how strong or weak a 2nd or 3rd degree connection is. While I know that this probably causes other problems, when I see that someone knows Jason Calcanis and I want an intro to him (I have 14 people that I connect to that know him), I would love to be able to tell who “really knows him”. I don’t hold my LinkedIn partners to the same high degree that I do. Especially for someone so high profile and with many partners like that.

This entry was posted
on Monday, January 18th, 2010 at 8:32 pm and is filed under Theories.
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